Them prices!
toolarg
Member Posts: 179
Whats up with the ridiculous prices for magic items in this game? I just reached Kuldahar and Conlan is basically insane if he thinks people living in some backwater town in the middle of a place that no one visits ever can afford his stuff. I'm seeing stuff in the range of 30k - 50k, and I barely have 3500 bucks. Are those items supposed to be for HoF mode? because I remember that in IWD2 items in that mode were much more expensive (and powerful). In my last playthrough of BG1 I accumulated something like 160k and even that wouldn't be enough to outfit a party of 6 with the best stuff here.
Anyways, just wanted to know if this is regular to the game or if I screwed something up, as I have installed tweaks anthology and a couple other mods.
Anyways, just wanted to know if this is regular to the game or if I screwed something up, as I have installed tweaks anthology and a couple other mods.
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Edit: In fact, the most important thing that you should buy as soon as possible is a Bag of Holding from Orrick's shop. You'll run out of space very soon without it.
BG is a game of abundance. Give it a little bit of time and eventually you'll get everything you ever wanted. Every mage will have enough scrolls to learn every spell. Your fighters will have a large enough pile of gold to buy out the stock of every shop in Amn. If you see it and you want it, you just get it with minimal effort.
That's not how IWD works. You're way out in the middle of the wilderness, as far from civilization as you can get. IWD is a game of scarcity. You're going to see a ton of magic items you'd like, but can't afford. You're not going to buy out entire shops, you're going to scrimp and save in order to buy one cherished treasure. The game isn't throwing spell scrolls at you; there's *ONE* scroll of Fireball in the entire game, and if you have two arcane casters, well, one of them is going to be using his level three spell slots on something else. (And heaven forbid if you fail to scribe it, because then you'll never be able to cast it all game.)
Even the random loot system in IWD leads to scarcity. In BG2, I can plan out all of my gear before I start. My Kensai might decide to dual-wield Foebane and Belm end-game, but he'll put early pips into Katanas so he can use Celestial Fury as a bridge weapon, and so on and so forth. Planning like that in IWD is a fool's errand-- you'll want your party's proficiencies to cover a wide spectrum because, outside of a few fixed spawns, you're never quite sure what you're going to get. (That's also partly why shops are so expensive: they're some of the few "guaranteed" items you'll ever see.)
It's a huge shock transitioning from one mindset to the other, but in the end, I find the IWD method to be far more rewarding. You really start to value everything you get.
I find that IWD playthroughs are a lot less formulaic than BG playthroughs, though, especially if you don't cheat on the 100% chance to scribe scrolls and you gratefully accept whatever the RNG gods deign to give you gear-wise.
I think I'm even starting to like it more than BG.
(I’m also not sure what you mean about discouraging experimentation. I’ve rolled a ton of very diverse parties. In fact, since you make six characters instead of one, there are *more* viable party permutations in IWD than BG. The fact that druids and bards actually kind of rock also dramatically increases the number of viable parties. You ever run through BG2 with four druids?)
It's simply a different experience. There are tricks here too...
Again, I *soloed the original release with a conjurer*. How does one complete a solo game? By defeating all required bosses. How does a Conjurer defeat enemies? Spoilers: with magic.
For starters, Belhifet wasn't *immune* to magic, he was *highly resistant* to magic. (I believe the original percentage was 80-90%.) If you cast magic missile on him, one or two usually got through to deal damage. There were stories early on of people trying Chromatic Orb on him, bypassing his magic resistance and getting a lucky roll on the saving throw, and leaving him stunned for over a turn / easy pickings.
Second, he wasn't even properly highly resistant to magic, he was highly resistant to *directly targeted magic*, which is a subset of all magic. Belhifet was not resistant to, say, casting haste on your entire party to double your murderspeed. (And, indeed, few adventurers back then would dare face Belhifet without Haste handy.)
Nor was he, or any enemy in the entire game, resistant to monster summoning (unlike BG2, where every hedge mage on every street corner has at least three Death Spells memorized), or to Tenser's Transformation, which was the method I used to take him down in my attempt. (Icewind Dale Tenser's was *baller* because it granted an extra APR.) The metaknowledge I needed for my solo was how to manipulate RNG to make sure my mage had a weapon with a high-enough enchantment to hit him in the first place, because the only +4 weapon a mage could equip was random loot.
Again, let me stress this. I killed Belhifit with a magic user using magic, which seems odd given that apparently Belhifet was immune to magic and the game forced you to use non-magic to kill him. Indeed, if we're going to call Belhifet "immune to magic", then we're going to have to call Firkraag and all of the BG2 liches "immune to magic", because they have comparable resistance to direct magic effects.
Icewind Dale wasn't skewed heavily against magic users. It was skewed heavily against having two full arcane casters because of limited scrolls, (though Mage + Bard or Mage + Fighter/Mage were both popular). And it was definitely skewed heavily against single-target damage spells and in favor of buffs / debuffs / area-of-effect spells. But buffs / debuffs / AoE spells are... still magic. As is divine spellcasting, which was *much* more effective in IWD than in BG2 (see: Druid's non-sucky spell selection, Righteous Wrath of the Faithful, and hordes of undead).
I'm not saying IWD is BAD. I'm saying its balance isn't that great. But it scratches a specific game itch VERY well. It does what it does very well. I'm gonna stop derailing this thread now.
The reason I tried the solo was because I was on an IWD message board and there was a debate as to whether a solo mage was even possible. This was just a month or two after the game came out, mind. A few other classes had been soloed, but mages were especially gimped in the attempt because the scroll scarcity meant they couldn't even "overlevel" for each challenge properly; you might have level 7 spell slots, but if the highest level scroll you found was level 5, they weren't doing you much good.
(Yes, this was unbalanced. But like I said, IWD was never balanced for solo, and especially not for a solo mage. It was balanced so that mages were getting useful spells in a timely manner during a full party-of-6 run-through.)
And as I mentioned, the bulk of the metaknowledge I needed was the random item loot tables, because soloing a mage required rather specific gear, some of which was not guaranteed to drop in a given playthrough.
Going solo is an exercise on fooling the system, its a fun experience, but you cant rate the games based on that style of playthrough. Maybe a mage cant beat the whole game by himself, I dont know, but Im sure he can do a heck of a lot for his party.
The dialogues variation gives this game even more reasons to be played over and over again.
For BG(2) I know how to optimize several classes and party compositions, from Candlekeep to Suldanesselar (I never finished ToB as I find it absolutely boring). To make this trilogy something close to be challenging I have to use things like crippled stats and anti-RP decisions like letting Carsomyr behind.
Never fully played PST as I also find it absolutely boring, but IMHO IWD is by far the best IE game.